ABOUT
I am interested in the ecological and evolutionary drivers of trait diversification, with a special focus on why and how coloration varies across species, habitats, and clades. There are three major themes to my research: (1) biophotonic structures (nanostructures that interfere with light to create color and other optical effects), (2) global patterns and drivers of fruit coloration, and (3) covariation in floral and fruit traits. I am particularly interested in how organisms achieve color diversity (ovel structural colors but also multifunctional pigments) as well as how the mechanism of color production influences eoclogical interactions at a variety of spatial scales.
Currently, I am a postdoc in Sönke Johnsen’s lab at Duke University where I study the biophotonic structures that enable adult fish to be transparent. I completed my PhD at Yale University in 2019 with Michael Donoghue, worked as an NSF PRFB jointly with Stacey Smith at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Silvia Vignolini at the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, and then did a postdoc with Dan Park (then at Purdue, now at Korea University).